Hello!!
I’m excited to share the news that just 2 days away from my 40th birthday I’ll start my Software Apprenticeship, which has a pathway to a job offer upon successful completion of said apprenticeship.
Background
I have a bachelor degree in International Business and most of my life I have worked in logistics until I became project manager for a food company. During my project management tenure my partner and I decided to have a baby. Eight months after having my little one, I was let go of my company due to a “restructure”.
I searched for a new job, but the market for business majors is extremely competitive and the salary barely covered my nanny’s salary, so I decided to be a full time mom for my baby until she could go to preschool.
Switching Careers Decision
I have always been a curious person and I have taken all sort of courses, from game dev, ancient greek history, graphic design to programming, and I always saw them as one of those things you love to do, but probably won’t be paid to do, but these hobbies saved me in the past from spiraling into depression when I moved from my home country to the US, so I turned to them during those few hours that I had a break from motherhood.
As I continued to learn about programming as a hobby, I read out of curiosity a couple of success stories here in FCC, and these anecdotes along with learning about growth mindset gave the perspective that I needed to give edge to my profession, but not my business profession, but my PROBLEM SOLVER profession, since challenge is what I relished from my business career, hobbies and life.
With my new problem or project, I started setting the scope of my work, as a mother I had limited time and resources, so bootcamps or expensive degrees were out of the table, so I prepare mentally for what I anticipated was going to be a long journey, which went more or less like this:
2017 - 2018
- Motherhood full time, breastfeeding kicks my ass
- Tested different tools, but decided to stick with Treehouse (free membership through library) and FCC to supplement knowledge
2018 - 2019
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Toddler started daycare near the 3rd quarter of the year
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Finally completed the Front End Track(treehouse), which I supplemented with command line, git and github courses.
2019-2020
- Polish my projects to display them in my portfolio
- Learned UX, research, planned, and develop my portfolio
- Attended Chorme Dev Summit / GithubUniverse with invitations
- Attended a couple of FCC meetups in my city
- Started to Learn more advanced JavaScript
2020-2021
- I Applied to outreachy internship and was part of the 33% accepted in the first phase
- Covid19 hits, back to parenting full-time and unable to move to the second phase to the internship !_!
- BOOM baby pregnant again
2021-2022
- Baby numero 2 is born, breastfeeding kicking my ass again, and feeling like a failure as a mother for not being able to do what might be the simplest thing and that everything that I plan is moving soooo slow
- OMG still covid, now in omega wave
- Learning React
- Translated a couple of FFC articles from english to Spanish
2022
- Things are getting back to normal, one of my LinkedIn contacts from one of the events that I attended in 2019, post about apprenticeships, I think about it, and do nothing because I don’t even have a nanny, time passes and the due date is getting closer, so I decided to apply thinking at least if I get an interview it’d be a good practice, and well here I am sharing the happy news
I’m not gonna lie, it was difficult sometimes to see, how other people achieve what I achieved in 3 or 6 months, but both maternity and covid played an important role into my timeline, and during my interview I highlighted my flexibility and resilience, so I hope this helps anyone that feels that’s taking forever, just run your race.
